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Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton

Pick of the week

How did we ever manage without de Botton? He has already helped us to fall in love, improve our lives by reading Proust, console ourselves with philosophy and get over our mixed feelings about going on holiday. Now, in his latest offering, he gives us a handy guide to "status anxiety" and how to cope with it. We worry too much about success and our place in society, and de Botton points his finger at a few causes of this unhappy state of affairs, from envy, consumerism and meritocracy to American self-improvement books. He keeps a firm grip on the obvious throughout, and his ponderings are couched in an oddly pseudo-rigorous style (complete with unneccessary diagrams to explain simple ideas) until the whole thing starts to feel like a parody of some kind. And yet despite its modest intellectual voltage, there is something undeniably charming and even reassuring about de